New Year, New AI Anti Drone Missile Systems

I think its every second week I end up writing about OpenAI. But that also checks out with the fact that it is one of my favorite companies. Another one of my favorite companies is the miltech company Anduril, but when I found out that they are collaborating, excitement was only my second emotion…

For those who don’t know, Anduril is a military technology company that is building high tech weapons like drones, missiles etc. (actually some super interesting stuff, Here’s their website if you want to check them out). But TBH even my first reaction to their partnership with OpenAI was WHAT THE ABSOLUTE AI APOCALYPTIC FUCKERY IS THIS??? Even though Anduril has been doing autonomous stuff before, the current trend of “reasoning” that OpenAI has been doing feels like something we should not be adding to weapons right now. OpenAI rules used to state that the technology could not be used in any military applications. They have changed those rules to include specific military applications. The current partnership only includes collaboration on the anti drone technology of Anduril and in the press conference they did say that “[Open AI] technology may still not be used to develop weapons, or to harm people or property”. They followed this by stating “partnership complies with the company’s rules because it is narrowly focused on systems that defend from unmanned aerial threats”.

The trend of utilizing AI in military technology is both not new and not against the larger industry trends. Computer vision systems have been used in military applications for a long time and other AI companies like Meta and Anthropic have also changed their rules to allow military use cases.

While I feel like this blew up mostly because people know Anduril mostly form mass manufactured missiles and OpenAI’s turn towards reasoning models, I feel like this is still a somewhat big deal. I’m not 100% sure even myself what to feel about this, but I do realize that someone will at some point do this anyways and it might as well be these 2. Either way, excited to see if we die in an AI apocalypse, get stuck in post AI capitalistic dystopia or manage to ascend to multi planetary demigods with the help of AI

Take care and happy new year!
- Roope Ripatti

Sources:
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/04/openai-anduril-military-ai 
https://www.anduril.com/article/anduril-partners-with-openai-to-advance-u-s-artificial-intelligence-leadership-and-protect-u-s/

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-Roope